When it comes to The Beatles, “Rubber Soul” is the album. They may reach arguably loftier artistic heights with “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “The White Album,” or “Abbey Road” — take your pick — but “Rubber Soul” embodies the group’s decisive turn towards self-conscious greatness. As far as The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was concerned, “Rubber Soul” marked the invention of the album as a long-playing musical format. And more than six decades later, with the release of the latest Beatles box set, “Rubber Soul” — incredible as it may seem — has never sounded better.
The album’s title harkens back to “I’m Down,” the B-side of the “Help!” single. At the end of the first take of “I’m Down,” Paul McCartney famously quipped that the band sounded like “plastic soul,” a joking but revealing phrase that captures The Beatles’ relationship to American rhythm and blues. Their British approach to R&B prized tightness, clarity, and buoyant precision over the loose, improvisational grit often associated with American soul. “Plastic soul,” then, becomes a conceptual shorthand for The Beatles’ chameleonic ability to absorb a genre’s core qualities and refashion it into something distinctly their own.
